


Five Ill-Advised Hookups Dan Cain Might Have Attempted

by dorothy_notgale



Category: Re-Animator (1985), The Evil Clergyman
Genre: Blasphemy, M/M, Poor Life Choices, Priest Sex, five things, incubus, madonna/whore complex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 11:17:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5783368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crossovers between Re-Animator and various other Jeffrey Combs movies, with emphasis on Dan Cain's awful choice in partners.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Ill-Advised Hookups Dan Cain Might Have Attempted

**Author's Note:**

> Seeking solace after testifying against Herbert, Dan enters a church for the first time in years.  
> Of course, Father Jonathan is happy to help soothe his sorrows.

The church is dark and night-deserted, sanctuary sketched out by a few candles and dimmed light fixtures. Dan hasn’t voluntarily entered a church in a decade or more, and this in no way resembles the small white-paneled Lutheran affair he grew up with. The smell of dust, wax, incense, and a faint whiff of rodent infestation mixes in his nostrils as he sits in an unpadded oak pew and tries to remember God.

Funny, he’d sworn on a Bible so recently… yet he can’t feel any of it. Can’t feel anything but a pain inside.

“Are you alright?”

Dan turns, about to express his annoyance at being interrupted _here_  of all places, until he sees the flash of clerical white at the speaker’s throat.

_Oh_.

The preacher or reverend--whatever it is Episcopalians call them--coalesces from shadows into a pool of candlelight. He’s a small man, pale-faced and black-eyed, and the darkness of his clothing blends back into the empty room.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.” His rustling voice reminds Dan of wind through autumn leaves, dried maple fluttering bloodred down the streets of Arkham every awful year. “You look… upset.”

“My friend is going to die,” he says through the thickness of misery clogging his throat.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” The cleric’s solemn expression softens, mouth turning up in the same practiced sympathy Dan sees (saw) daily at the hospital. Terminal diagnoses spark universal reactions. “God’s will is sometimes painful.”

“He’s gonna die because I betrayed him.”

The man’s face shifts, or maybe it’s the candlelight, but even procedural kindness is enough to move Dan’s too-loose lips:

“I spoke at his trial. He won’t survive a week in prison.” It’s the first time he’s voiced it, the awful stark truth of his actions and their consequences.

“If your sworn testimony was enough to convict him, he must have been guilty.”

“He is.” Guilty, as Dan is guilty, but Dan’s not the one they’ll crucify.

“Do you believe you made the right choice?” the man asks, approaching as though Dan might flee into the night at any sudden movement.

“Pastor--”

“It’s Father, for my sins--Father Jonathan.”

“Jonathan.”

“You’re clearly not one of my congregation.” A smile twitches the corners of his generous mouth at Dan’s presumption, but he keeps advancing. “You were saying?”

“I believe that I did… what I had to.”

“Don’t we all.” He stops beside the pew where Dan hunches, forgiveness writ large across his features. “What’s your name, my _son_?” His expression is gentle, ingratiating, with a betraying hint of wry humor. He’s a balm, sandalwood-scented. And yet, he’s not something Dan can use beyond tonight.

“Charles.” His cousin’s name leaps to his tongue the same way every carefully framed half-truth had on the stand. It had been so _easy_ at last to free himself by spinning gossamer threads of narration and circumstance around the thing that used to hold him.

“Charles.” Full lips quirk when shaping the name in a way that says Jonathan knows it’s false. The silky voice still feels like a caress, however misplaced. “Would you like to talk?”

“No.” He’s talked enough for one day, talked himself empty without ever speaking aloud any of the real truths he’ll take to the grave. “But… could you pray for me?”

“ _For_ you…” a question manifests in the wrinkling of Jonathan’s brow, but remains unspoken as he instead sits down close enough for Dan to feel his heat. “Certainly.”

Dan doesn’t know how long they stay like that, he with his head bowed over uselessly clasped hands, reaching internally for the unfathomable but sensing only the clicking of beads and the voiceless movement of Jonathan’s lips in a fervid foreign litany. Finally, though, the priest rouses himself from whatever conversation he’s having with his higher power to check his watch. It’s a curiously mundane gesture which nevertheless demonstrates a fluidity of movement that flashes Dan’s throat dry.

The watch reads three minutes to midnight, he notes as Jonathan stands.

“I should lock up.”

“Right.” Dan shifts forward in preparation for leaving, then sighs, body feeling a thousand pounds heavier with the weight of his sins. The other man’s lush mouth works, sympathy and propriety warring in his expression.

“You could…” he almost stutters, hand hovering near Dan’s shoulder like a moth, “I could make coffee, and we could talk, if you’re not ready to leave.”

His eyes flicker, dark and shiny. They never settle for long, but survey Dan piecemeal: flitting to hands, throat, lips, anything but a full view. They dismember him and nibble the parts. It’s a way of looking with which Dan feels acutely, painfully acquainted, though he’s never been on its receiving end.

That gaze doesn’t just stay above the waist.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Never let it be said I turned away a soul in need.” The words are an offer, but his tone contains a hungry ache, a subliminal request for companionship that resonates in Dan’s bones.

“Then yes, I’d like that, Jonathan.”

Slim hips sway with an unselfconscious grace as Jonathan locks the old brass-handled door, as Dan follows him up to a simply-appointed suite where the smell of rat and dust intensifies, and Dan feels a strange, recognizable pull low in his chest.

Coffee. Talk. _Really_.

Then it’s Dan who stands too close by the kitchen counter, who leans in and smiles. So solicitous, his host, and he trembles when Dan takes his hot hand instead of the proffered mug.

But he doesn’t pull away when Dan strokes his cheek. “Shh.”

“I--” Pallid cheeks betray a hint of a flush, those flitting eyes at last downcast and curtained by thick lashes. “What are you doing?”

“You know what we’re doing.” Such a slim waist in Dan’s grasp, so wonderfully set off by that rigidly tailored uniform.

“You’d have me violate my vows.”

The man’s a blackbird fluttering and pecking in Dan’s palm. His neglected desire is hot and evident against Dan’s seeking thigh, and his forbiddenness intoxicating.

“Do you want to?”

“God, _yes_ ,” Jonathan breathes, hands alighting on Dan’s shoulders as though of their own volition.

“Then don’t worry.” (Dan has always been persuasive in this. Meg’s father, now in Heaven, would have had her die a nun if he could. Another virgin had… Well. In that as in all things, Herbert’s reasons for acceding to depravity had been his own.) “I’m not part of your congregation, and I can keep a secret.”

“Can you, Judas?”

“What?”

“Keep a secret? I thought that telling secrets was what brought you here in the first place.”

“It wasn’t _telling_. It was a confession.” It’s hurtful, this jousting, but the sting is sweet, something he more than deserves.

“Confession?” The priest’s voice drops, intimate and inviting. “Well. What else do you have to confess?”

“Nothing else.” Dan dips his head slowly, waits for Jonathan’s lips to tilt and meet his own halfway before taking that first tiny bite of his chastity.

“I stand corrected,” Jonathan says dreamily, the feel of his hands on Dan’s shoulders transforming from a clutch to a subtle but implacable downward push. “You _can_ keep a secret. Do you know what comes after confession?”

Oh, if his memory of the time Meg dragged him to Sacred Heart is right, he’ll never get over how _wrong_ this is. Charming. He lets himself be guided down to his knees, unzips-untucks-removes and then.

Jonathan’s cock is a surprise, uncut and blood-dark where Dan’s used to smooth circumcised pinkness. He’s only touched ones like this professionally in the past, but that’s fine. Different is good.

It tastes different, too, a deep and almost sulfurous flavor blooming when preejaculate leaks onto his tongue.

It’s going to blow through him like holy fire, cleansing, eradicating what was there in the past.

He sucks violently, ready for the end from the moment he begins, until a steady hand grasps him by the back of the neck and slows him.

“What is this, Charles?”

Penance. Atonement.

Ruination.

He’s going to break this man’s morals like his were broken, feed on this purity to renew himself.

With a stranger’s flesh muffling him, Dan’s voice is silenced, and still his tongue wreaks havoc. He’s filthy and wrong and he’s turning this clean creature into one as dirty as himself. He’s a liar and a cheat, and soon Jonathan will be too. He’s painfully aroused by the time his practiced sinful touches have Jonathan coming with a startled gasp, hot semen flooding Dan’s mouth and dripping down his chin like an erroneous benediction.

Jonathan’s hand lingers, stroking Dan’s jaw, for just a moment before they move as one and fall clumsily to the narrow twin bed (not the worst Dan’s had--not as narrow as a Peruvian military cot) that dominates the cell.

“Charles…”

“It’s all right, Jonathan,” Dan lies, tugging the collar aside and stealing his fingers beneath the double placket to quickly unbutton his victim’s shirt. “You’re making me feel so much better.”

He is gentle in his destruction, unlike he once was with another as virginal but so much less innocent. There’s no need to cause more damage than this inevitably will, after all. Instead, he strokes and teases, kissing and suckling and praising. He uses every little trick he shouldn’t know to work that body back into a shivering exploitable frenzy.

Jonathan’s pupils are enormous, wells of longing a loving partner could drown in. If ever a man _wasn’t_ made for the priesthood, this is he. Yielding and licentious, so very needy when divested of his suffocating, isolating black garb.

And finally when Dan’s got him aching, he reaches unasked into the bedside drawer and finds the celibate’s best friend, hand lotion, nestled besides the King James Bible.

At that point, the tide seems to turn, Jonathan moving to become an active participant in this downfall. He touches and writhes, opens himself with breathless little oaths and a hauntingly knowing look. He positions Dan against the headboard, wrought brass on his shoulders a cold familiarity he’d thought lost so long ago with the rest of the Darkmore house’s furnishings.

When the priest finally lowers himself onto Dan’s shaft, his face shines, sensual and rapacious. His lithe form ripples with that same inherent carnality that had fit so poorly under his vestments; he looks like he’d be a wonderful dancer. Moonlight turns his no-longer-shy eyes to silvered mirrors.

His insides are flame, squeezing and burning to the core.

One small hand rises to Dan’s chest, hovering precisely above the source of his ache. As fingers circle in an aimless, repeating pattern, he feels a faint beckoning tug, an invitation or an opportunity that he distantly considers. The pressure rises, a tiny breezy thing dashing itself on his consciousness, before vanishing like the release of a sob.

“Oh.” That papery voice is deeper, roughened by sex in a way Dan hadn’t expected but nonetheless enjoys for the change it represents. “Ohhhh. You sly dog, Charles. You _do_ have more secrets.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dan says, rolling them smoothly to the very edge of the mattress. (In Peru, the cots had been so low that in this position he could put an arm out and use the bare ground for leverage. Now he just uses the headboard.)

Jonathan’s laugh is as silvery as his eyes, but oddly backed by some rasping sandpaper cackle which seems to emanate from lower, below the bed.

“You can’t give me your heart,” he says breathily as Dan drives deeper. “Given the chance, I’d keep you. Keep you for my very own, until I grew tired… but somebody else already has the best part of you.”

It’s an awful, perceptive thing for him to say. Shame gathers in the back of Dan’s throat at what he’s taken and what he won’t leave behind.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into the crook of neck and shoulder. “I had--”

“A _true love_?” The chuckle sounds strangely mocking as hot touches paint Dan’s back like wax.

It had been, though, of course it had. Meg’s heart and Dan’s were a matched set, and all the things that came between them would have worked out in time. He belonged back there, in that world Herbert destroyed.

But he’s here, now, still blaspheming against both God and love with this strange, sweet body sworn to celibacy and increasingly obviously defiled.

Dan hesitates, too long, too long a pause, and when he looks up Jonathan’s smile grows eerie and fractured.

“You were his disciple, weren’t you?” the cleric hisses. “The one you deny? The one you bore witness against?”

“No.” Dan averts his gaze and begins to thrust in earnest, closing his eyes against that twisted knowing mouth, the wreckage of perfection he’s using.

“Mmm. Lying’s a sin, you know.” Somehow, the legs around his waist shift and shimmy, take control from him in a move practiced and well-oiled as the finest machine. “I can’t save your soul, Charlie, or damn it. Not after what you’ve done with it. You gave it away. But God knows, your body’s a nice one.”

His chest hurts when too-similar lips brush his ear and issue a command:

_“Kiss me.”_

A few years later, Dan sees that face, solemn and soft and awkwardly pretty, at the head of the Obituaries section of the Arkham Patriot.

Suicide. By hanging.

He doesn’t rip his own guts out over it.


End file.
